Adventures in Legal Outsourcing to India and Beyond

November 2009

November 09, 2009

A couple of us at SDD Global
Solutions had the privilege of attending TEDIndia.To call this conference mind-blowing would be not only to
use a cliché. It also would be to engage in understatement.It seems that for many of the over 900 business leaders, artists,
non-profit organizers, lawyers, film directors, scientists, venture
capitalists, designers, spiritual luminaries, philanthropists, movie stars, students,
inventors, philosophers, government officials, and authors who gathered from
all over the world for four days in Mysore this week, it was a life-changing
experience.It is impossible
to carry on “business as usual” after attending TED.As one speaker, educator Shukla Bose, put it (and I am
paraphrasing):“Write your own obituary.If you are not happy with the way it
reads, change your life.” We also learned, among countless other things, that
India is likely to be the focal point for changing the world.

For those of you not
familiar with TED, its mantra is “ideas worth spreading.”Originally conceived in 1984 with the
purpose of bringing together the worlds of technology, entertainment, and
design (and in the process, forming the acronym, TED), the organization now
brings together the world’s most fascinating speakers and doers in virtually
all fields.TED challenges each of
them to deliver “the talk of their lives,” in 18 minutes.Past speakers have included such “big
names” as Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Nandan Nilekani, Jane Goodall, Vilayanur
Ramachandran, Sir Richard Branson, Philippe Starck and Bono.

But one of the hallmarks of TED is that
many of the attendees are just as interesting as the speakers, if not more so, and
TEDIndia was no exception.Added
to the mix this time were 103 “fellows” – essentially the most courageous,
imaginative, inspiring and accomplished young people in India and the rest of
Asia.They attended the conference
free of charge, but they added plenty of “charge” to the event, in the form of
energy, excitement, and uplift. Unlike
so many international conferences, TED India was not even close to being
dominated by wealthy, middle-aged, North American men.

So what was it like, in
particular?

It was a chance, coffee-break
encounter with Ali Babar, a precocious 16-year-old boy from West Bengal, who
handed me his business card, which signified that he was the “Headmaster” of a
school.I assumed he made the same
mistake I made once, which is to hand out, by accident, someone else’s
card.I made this incorrect
assumption before I saw Ali on stage the next day, and before I learned that he
actually is a worldwide hero, even a media celebrity, who took matters into his
own hands at the age of nine, by
organizing an outdoor afternoon school (with no funding, and no building) now comprised
of 800 child laborers in his village – children who otherwise would have no
education at all.After meeting
and hearing Ali Babar, I am humbled and motivated.Our company has received funding in the seven figures, yet I
feel we have not done nearly as much as this boy has accomplished with nothing
but drive and ingenuity.

TEDIndia was me standing in
line at the bar at a Barclays-sponsored gala at Lalitha Mahal Palace, trying to
make the agonizing decision of whether to have orange juice or wine, and then falling
into a conversation with a world-famous neuroscientist.She patiently explained to me, during
our long wait, and in dismaying detail, the damaging effects of alcohol on
brain cells, demonstrated by brain scan images.I lamely replied with a quote from a Lou Reed song, “The
Power of Positive Drinking.”Lou
sang that “some say liquor kills the cells in your head, but for that matter,
so does getting out of bed.”This
was no match for the neuroscientist.

TEDIndia was finding out, at
the end of a howlingly funny and wildly informative presentation by Swedish
professor Hans Rosling, that according to computer models and statistics, July
27th, 2048 is the exact date when India will catch up with the U.S. in terms of
average income per capita. For
this, Professor Rosling earned the first of countless standing ovations that the
enthusiastic TED audience delivered to speakers at this conference.

Another news flash from Rosling: The first tweet was in 1858, after the completion of the first transatlantic cable. U.S. President Buchanan tweeted to Queen Victoria, as follows: "This will help diffuse liberty throughout the world."

TEDIndia was
networking.It was literally
bumping into a French owner of an Indo-French technology company, which is
developing software for the legal outsourcing industry (the one we’re in).I had an animated conversation with
him, followed by his introducing me to two London film production company
owners, who quickly expressed an interest in hiring our company and my law
firm.TEDIndia was me talking to
Parmesh Shahani, the author of “Gay Bombay: Globalization, Love, and
(Be)Longing in Contemporary India,” and bringing a smile to Parmesh’s face when
I informed him that his book is in the window at the Infosys company bookstore.TEDIndia was me sitting next to a
stranger on the bus, during a field trip to an innovative charity hospital in a
poor village, only to find out that the stranger is the manager of a
three-billion-dollar, India-focused venture capital fund, and that he thinks
what we’re doing at SDD Global is “amazing.”TEDIndia also involved my sitting down to lunch next to
another stranger, who turned out to be an expert in a subject I want
to learn:how to bring together
spirituality and commerce. (She works for the Business and Consciousness
Initiative.)As the popular
blogger and author, Amit Varma, put it:“TED India means having to bring an extra suitcase just to hold all of
your business cards.” As the self-appointed ambassador for the legal
outsourcing industry at the conference (hey, we were the only company in our
field to participate), I ran out of cards half-way through.

TEDIndia was stunning
synchronicity in action.Here’s
one example.Social activist Sunitha
Krishnan disturbed and roused the crowd with an angry, old-fashioned, agitprop
invective against the scandalously horrific treatment of Indian girls by human
traffickers.This was tempered by Sunitha’s
heartwarmingly positive stories about some of the more than 3,200 involuntary prostitutes she
has rescued from Indian brothels, through her organization, Prajwala. After the
talk, there was a computer malfunction, delaying a musical performance.The musician said that after the talk,
he was so upset that he almost could not go forward with the performance
anyway.During the awkward moments
while the glitch was being fixed, a lone woman in the audience stood up,
without a microphone.She told us
all, in a loud voice, that she would donate $10,000 to the Prajwala
rehabilitation center, if 10 others would do the same.Within about 4 seconds, 15 donors
raised their hands to take up the challenge.A talk, a glitch, a courageous voice, and over $150,000 was
raised to save an orphanage that otherwise faced eviction by its landlord, who
wants to turn the building into a shopping mall.

TEDIndia was fun.At one of the nightly parties, the
Indian choreographer for “Slumdog Millionaire,” Longinus Fernandes, while looking
strangely like James Brown, enticed a couple hundred of us onto a large stage,
and then proceeded to lead us all in an absurdly humorous attempt at group
dancing / hand waiving, accompanied by thunderous, thumping, Bollywood disco
Asian fusion music.Yes, I
used the word, “us.”After much
resistance, even I succumbed.I
jumped on the stage as soon as the opening chords of “Jai Ho” sounded.I seriously hope this does not appear
on YouTube.I believe I share this
hope with several captains of industry, who were waiving their hands in the air
like they just didn’t care.Now,
in the sober light of day, perhaps they do.

As mentioned above, the
conference also included amazing speakers. It would take over a dozen pages just to summarize all of
the ideas they shared. Here are just
a few:

SHASHI THAROOR –
INDIAN GOVERNMENT MINISTER

The erudite Shashi
Tharoor, an acclaimed author as well as Indian Minister of
State for External Affairs (next job:Secretary General of the U.N.), brought the crowd to its feet with a
polished, effectively delivered speech on the future of India.I guess it was the presence of Minister
Tharoor, as well as that of “His Holiness the 17th Gyalwang
Karmapa,” the successor to the Dalai Lama, which led to the massive security at
the conference, including dozens of militarized police, wearing camouflage and toting
automatic rifles.

In response to the increasingly
frequent predictions that India and China will become the new “world leaders”
and “superpowers,” Minister Tharoor openly questioned the meaning of those
phrases. Do they mean military and
economic might?He says no.He says the country that rises to
leadership will be the one that projects “soft power.” In other words, it will be the country
that attracts others by the power of example.Simply put, Tharoor argues that the country that leads the
world will be the one that tells the best stories.That nation is India.He mentioned the incredible story of the cell phone revolution, in which
phones are being purchased by the hundreds of millions, in large part by
farmers and fishermen, bettering their lives through the sharing of economic,
political and other information.He went on to embrace the amazing story of India’s hugely diverse,
plural democracy, in which people of disparate religions, ethnicity, cultures,
and languages have learned to live together.He cited the story of how, in a country that is 90% Hindu,
the people elected a party led by an Italian Catholic (Sonia Gandhi), who
turned over the Prime Minister position to a Sikh (Manmohan Singh), who in turn
was sworn in by the then-President, a Muslim (A.P.J. Abdul Kalam). Minister Tharoor also marveled at how
India’s differing groups have reached a profound consensus on how to handle
their lack of consensus.

PRANAV MISTRY -- INVENTOR

MIT’s Pranav Mistry, perhaps
one of the two or three top inventors alive today, who wowed previous TED
audiences and the world with his “Sixth Sense” device, did it again at
TEDIndia.In the question and
answer session after his presentation, he made world headlines in the New York Times and elsewhere, by
casually mentioning that within a matter of months, he will be making his
incredibly valuable software available to the world for free, on an open source
basis.For those of you have been
living under a rock, “Sixth Sense” is a wearable, hi-tech device that turns
your hand into a phone, your wrist into a watch, your newspaper into a video
screen, and any product at a grocery store into a wealth of information about
ingredients, health, ethics, well-being and comparative pricing. At TEDIndia, Pranav demonstrated
further improvements to the device, including the ability to turn any piece of
paper into a computer.He
obviously is being courted by every major IT company in the world, which makes his
open source announcement all the more astounding.

TONY HSIEH – CEO

Tony Hsieh, CEO of the
phenomenally successful online retailer, Zappos, gave a riveting talk on
happiness as a business model. The
TED blog summarized his talk as follows:

Although
we know his company as an online retailer of shoes and clothing, he really aims
to create happiness in customers and happiness in employees. He's talking about
happiness as a business model. He underscores passion, quoting Puff Daddy:
"Don't chase the paper, chase the dream." He highlights the importance
of company culture. And as everyone's ultimate goal is happiness for he spends
a little time talking about the science of happiness and different types of
happiness. Great businesses combine pleasure, passion and purpose, Hsieh
concludes.

In that vein, Tony talked about how
people often are very bad at predicting what will make them happy (lottery
winners being one of the best examples), which is why the science of happiness
needs to be studied.I hope that
he and the audience understand that happiness in a business setting can mean
different things for people in different countries.For example, although money and status may have diminishing
returns for many in the West, those things can bring some degree of happiness to
many employees in India, for religious, historical, and cultural reasons, even
if money and status are not enough for the full, lasting happiness of anyone
anywhere.For me, another
important point Tony made, besides the importance of happiness as a corporate
goal, was the argument that successful companies must have “committable core
values,” not just mission statements that are written for PR purposes and then
essentially thrown away.By “committable,”
he means that you should be able to walk the talk, and even hire and fire on
the basis of those values.

At our own company, we once had an
incident in which managers did not take legitimate employee complaints
seriously enough.We are not going
to fire anyone simply because of a TED talk.But Tony’s presentation confirmed my belief that if we are
serious about the values we espouse, including respect for each and every
employee, then those ultimately responsible for such incidents, namely the
managers, must be held accountable in their monthly performance review. On the positive side, Tony’s talk
confirmed the wisdom of our efforts to introduce more fun into the workweek,
such as our “Movie of the Week,” which involves our resident “VJ” (and
outstanding lawyer), Ashish Kumar, taking employee polls and choosing a movie
to show on most Friday afternoons, during working hours.We’ve interviewed several job
candidates who told us, when asked what they know about our company, that one
of the attractions is our low-pressure work environment, exemplified by Ashish’s
“Movie of the Week.”

Three other points from Tony Hseih’s
talk:(1) The only way employees can see work as a calling
is if they are growing personally and professionally the entire
time, (2) follow
vision first, not money -- the latter will come if you are truly committed to
your vision, and (3) on a related note, do what you would be happy to do for 10
years, even if you did not make a dime of profit.I also was encouraged to learn from Tony that it took over
four years for his company to get organized around all of the above principles,
and even longer for them to pay off.It makes me feel better to see how far our company has come in three
years, and I am less disappointed that we are not yet fully there.

DEVDUTT PATTANAIK – CHIEF BELIEF
OFFICER

Dr. Devdutt
Pattanaik, “Chief Belief Officer” of the Future Group, one of India’s largest
corporations, gave the best talk on comparative mythology I have ever
heard.I took mythology courses at
Columbia, and none of them were anywhere near as compelling as this talk about the “business of mythology.”For example, Dr. Pattanaik compared the
linear mythology of the West, based on the idea of winning at all costs, and on
being heroic and spectacular during our brief time on earth, with the cyclical
mythology of the East, in which “death” is only a passage way, like everything
else.

He also told the story of Ganesha’s race
around the world with his brother, Kartikeya, to illustrate the difference
between “my world” and “the world.”Kartikeya took a long time to circle “the world,” because it is objective, containing all of the plants,
the animals, the sky, the mountains, the clouds, the rivers, and the stars. But Ganesha won the race, by circling
the subjective “my world” of thoughts and feelings, dreams and memories. The lesson, which I believe was a
contrast between the Western and the Eastern, and perhaps even between the
masculine and the feminine, was that what matters most is what we alone feel,
rather that what everyone sees.

Dr. Pattanaik also contrasted the Western God, who issued the Ten Commandments,
with Hinduism, where there are no scriptural mandates at all, and where the
believers never know where they stand with the deities.He explained that this is one of the
reasons why in the Hindu faith, people go to the temple to have an audience
with God, not with a priest.This
also is why the physical representations of the Hindu deities usually have
large eyes – because they are open and empathic.(I wonder if
this is why Ganesha takes the form of an elephant, with such large ears, all
the better to hear!)Devdutt talked
about how these myths affect business practices, as well as shaping the course
of history. To mention one
example, he talked about a ritual in his company, in which a new manager is blindfolded
and surrounded by his colleagues before he gets his or her title.When the blindfold is removed, and the
manager is able to see the employees and empathize with them, he is ready to be
a manager.In Devdutt’s words:

A leader must see his
people. He must recognize them for who they are, rather than what he wants them
to be. More often than not, leaders don’t have eyes – or rather they see only
themselves. Their eyes are only for their vision of the world. They do not
realize there are others around them with other visions of life. This lack of
eyes strips them of all empathy. Everything is measured and valued against
their own vision. Those who align with their vision are good; those fail to do
so are bad. Intellectual leaders with an intellectual outlook of things
therefore look down upon people who are not intellectual. Emotional leaders
keep advising non-emotional team members to transform for their betterment.
Task oriented leaders do not value people oriented team members and vice versa.
In other words, they see nothing but themselves and constantly seek themselves
in others. They notice no one else.

Although I
believe Dr. Pattanaik prefers Hindu mythology over Greek, he said
that when asked the question of which is best, his answer is the Indian headbobble,
a circular motion that combines both yes and no in one gesture.At this, the conclusion of his talk,
the audience gave Devdutt an unambiguous, enthusiastic, standing and laughing
ovation.

EVE ENSLER –
PLAYWRIGHT

Acclaimed playright Eve
Ensler delivered an “in your face” feminist
testimonial that rocked the house, at least half of which was Indian. Here’s the summary from the TED
blog:

She asks
us to get in touch with our “girl self” -- an attribute that is a part of every
human being, but which has been suppressed by cultural power-structures. She
says “being a girl is so powerful that we've taught everyone not to be that.”
She takes us to Congo, where women are raped routinely as a part of the
barbaric conflict. She takes us to her childhood, where her father abused her
sexually -- and she realized that her crying exposed his brutality. It’s a
travesty, she says, that young boys are taught to be cold, hardened, to behave
without tenderness or compassion. Just as girls are oppressed, they are also
objectified, and also “trained to please.” Girls must be taught to educate. The
fate of the girl is entwined with the fate of humankind. The capacity for girls
to overcome situations is mind-blowing -- as a species, we need to learn from
that capacity. She closes with a powerful, energizing reading from “I Am an
Emotional Creature.”

Yet another standing
ovation. One of Ms. Ensler’s most
memorable lines, referring to what often happens when young men are taught that
“boys don’t cry,” was this one: “Bullets
are hardened tears.” In honor of the
amazing Eve Ensler, I will tell you that I cried several times during TEDIndia
talks. But they were always tears
of joy. I also have to confess the
unimaginable. During a song medley
by Indian superstar vocalist Usha Uthup, I joined the crowd in singing “We are the World.” I even
waved my arms in the air!Again, I
hope this does not appear on YouTube.

C.K. PRAHALAD – WORLD’S MOST
INFLUENTIAL BUSINESS THINKER

Named by Thinkers 50
as the #1 business visionary in the world for 2009 (numbers 2, 3, and 4 are
Malcolm Gladwell, Paul Krugman, and Steve Jobs), C.K.
Prahalad gave a sophisticated lecture. It seemed to dovetail with his
bestselling, pathbreaking book, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.” Dr.
Prahalad identifies the world’s poor (the “bottom of the pyramid”) as a mostly
untapped market for companies, worth up to $13 trillion a year in
revenues. In his words, “the real
source of market promise is not the wealthy few in the developing world, or
even the emerging middle-income consumers. It is the billions of aspiring poor who are joining the
market economy for the first time.” A market at the bottom of the pyramid could
be co-created by multi-national and domestic industry, non-governmental organizations
and, most importantly, the poor themselves. In his TED talk, Dr. Prahalad warned against “learning
disabilities” on the part of companies, leading to mistakes, such as mistaking
current profits for leadership, and unwillingness to face up to capability gaps. He seems to be saying that the answer
lies in democratizing technology, communication, and learning, such that
everybody from the top to the bottom will know what’s going on.

HORST RECHELBACHER – FOUNDER
OF AVEDA

Horst Rechelbacher, the founder of
Aveda (purchased by Estee Lauder for a fortune) and the new nonprofit organic
cosmetics company, Intelligent Nutrients, gave an interesting talk, combining
business with spirituality, and environmentalism with cosmetics. He began with a story of how the Buddha actually
gave people the (middle) finger, by which he meant “you are one with
everything,” not “go to hell.” Horst
says the best way to be an environmentalist is to live a lifestyle of
responsible consumption. Here’s
the summary from the TED Blog:

Everything
is based on cause and effect -- the law of karma -- so human beings should be
mindful of the chain of consequences. Particularly, the ubiquity of toxic
chemicals in daily products can have damaging effects on our health. The lips,
for example, are the fastest delivery system for the body, so the toxic
petrochemicals in lipstick go directly into the bloodstream. That is why he has
developed an organic beauty line, including a mineral-rich lipstick that makes
kissing more nutritious!

SHAFFI MATHER –
PIONEER OF FOR-PROFIT SOLUTIONS

Social
entrepreneur Shaffi Mather brought the TEDIndia audience to its feet with
amazing examples of profitable enterprises that change the world for the better. The
following is from the TED Blog:

He
founded a 911-like emergency medical response service called Ambulance Access
for All. It's a fully sustainable business that is completely free of charge to
victims, yet does not require public funds. (His system provided medical care
to 125 victims of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year.) Now he's
branching out, creating Education Access for All and Moksha Yug Access. He
talks about his new venture: a system to fight corruption and improve
transparency in big business and in government. (He stresses that corruption is
not a black-and-white issue: any common person can be driven, by need, to
bribery.) He wants to fight corruption by creating a "pest-control-like
service" that will allow citizens to press back against the factors that
contribute to it.

As a business executive whose Indian
company sometimes is the target of shake-downs by local officials, I was
mesmerized by Shaffi’s stories, including the fact that out of 42 cases where
his new company (seemingly modeled after Ghostbusters) exposed and took a stand
against corruption, the guilty officials backed down.Equally remarkable is the fact that in every case, the cost
of fighting back was far less than the amount of the bribe the officials
demanded.I believe this could me
a monumental model for developing countries everywhere.

KIRAN BIR SETHI – EDUCATOR
EXTRAORDINAIRE

Kiran
Bir Sethi, who founded the
amazing Riverside School in Ahmedabad, also brought the house down, with her
stories of how children in some ways took over the city, influencing government
officials, business owners, and even their own parents, to change their ways
for the good.This from the TED
blog:

She
says “contagious is a good word -- even in the age of H1N1. Laughter is
contagious too.” She wants us to get infected with “I can.” She shows video
clips of common practices at Riverside School -- practices that give children
the feeling that they can go out and change the world. By making children aware
of learning, enabling them to teach themselves, the system empowers them to
teach others -- including their own parents. The public service aspect of the
program may seem a diversion from core education programming, but the students
at Riverside have shown to out-perform other students in math, science, and
English studies.

ANIL GUPTA – FOUNDER OF THE
HONEYBEE NETWORK

I guess it is no accident
that nearly all of my favorite speakers received a standing ovation, and Anil
Gupta is yet another of them.This, from the TED Blog:

As the
founder of the Honeybee Network, Anil Gupta and his team search the world for
low-cost innovations created out of the necessities of poverty. Today, at
TEDIndia, he energizes the audience by animatedly explaining his creative model
and showing the amazing inventions they've come across. He speaks on behalf of those in villages
and slums who have solved their local problems, ingeniously, without outside
help. “I realized I am an exploiter,” he says, because his own success is based
on knowledge he learned from many people -- people who remain anonymous and
unacknowledged. If India wants to be a knowledge society, it must give
recognition to those whose ingenuity has taught us how to solve these specific
problems. He started Honey Bee
Network to help spread great, local ideas to the world, while giving those who
generate them the proper compensation -- in such a way that the “flower doesn't
mind that the pollen is taken.” The Honey Bee Network wants to create markets
for artists, craftsmen, inventors -- so people can be paid for what they are
good at.

I was especially enthralled
by Anil’s account, documented with video footage, of a destitute, elderly, illiterate
farmer who invented and manufactured an amphibious bicycle, so that he could
cross a flood zone to reach his wife.While watching this frail farmer pedaling across the water on his bike,
I could not help but think:Is
there anything the Indian people cannot do; is there anything our Indian
employees cannot achieve;when it
comes to ingenuity and innovation, provided there is enough inspiration and
incentive?

SHUKLA BOSE – CORPORATE
LEADER TURNED EDUCATOR

Another recipient of a “standing
O,” Shukla Bose provided tremendous inspiration for me and I think everyone. Here’s the TED Blog summary:

Shukla
Bose founded the Parikrama schools -- a system for poor children in India that
gives individual attention and gets spectacular results. She recalls her successes in
corporate life -- accomplishments that left her still wanting more. After
trying to write her own obituary, and realizing she had nothing to say about
herself, she left the for-profit world and instead invested herself in
educating the poor. She was soon overwhelmed by the numbers: hundreds of
millions of Indian children lacking education, literacy, math skills. Instead
of fixating on the daunting numbers, she decided to focus on “just one child”:
bringing one child at a time through a complete education. Thus, Parikrama
Foundation was born. After six years, over 1,000 children from slums and
orphanages have joined her education system. Her system disproves the myth that
learning English is beyond the reach of children from slums. Now she's
extending the program to educate and improve the lives of parents as well. The
program remains focused on empowering "one child at a time" -- never
getting bogged down with questions of "scale," and continuing to
focus on quality of education.

I was especially impressed
by the videos showing slum children, who had studied English for only three
months, speaking the language fluently and effectively.Given that English is the language of
globalization, and also given the strange fact that no other language,
including Hindi, has as much reach across the many states of India, in which
over 50 other languages are spoken, this bodes well for these children, who
seem destined to get knowledge industry jobs or better.Perhaps it even bodes well for me.Given my seeming inability to learn the
local language of Kannada, which reigns among most people in the city and state
where I live, perhaps I will do better when I start Kannada classes tomorrow,
thanks to the inspiration provided by the students of Shukla Bose.

I also was inspired by Ms.
Bose's lack of obsession over scale, and her focus on quality.Our relatively small company is in an
industry (legal outsourcing) that seems to dwell too much on size, or
"employee strength," a misnomer that suggests strength comes from
numbers rather than skills and enthusiasm.

SHEKHAR KAPUR – FILM
DIRECTOR

Acclaimed film director Shekhar
Kapur (Elizabeth) promptly tore up
his speech and dropped the pieces on the stage, announcing that “now, I'm in
absolute panic.” He says it's a symbolic gesture he performs all the time while
directing movies. As the TED Blog
recounts, “He allows himself to go into chaos, hoping that some truth will come
out of it. The first thing he learned about storytelling is to panic, because
that is the only way to get rid of your mind. Out of the emptiness, comes a
moment of creativity.”

SADHGURU JAGGI VASUDEV
-- MYSTIC

Given the large
number of phony sadhus (fake Indian mystics), I instinctively was skeptical about
this Mysore-born guru with his flowing robes and long white beard.I also felt sorry for him, since TED
repeatedly misspelled his name as Sadguru, inadvertently suggesting that he
suffers from depression.But he
is anything but sad, and his humorous, down-to-earth, and deep talk won me
over.I especially was intrigued
by his point about
how the mind can create its own reality. He told a very funny story,
actually a joke, about a woman who had a dream while sleeping. In the
dream, a “real hunk of a man” approached her in her bedroom, causing her
to shake, “and not from fear.” In the dream, she said to the man, “what
are you going to do to me!?” He replied, “Hey lady, it's YOUR dream.”For more about the talk, here is the
entry from the TED Blog:

Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev recounts his journey to arrive at
the conclusion that life is not human-centric; rather, experience is created
from within the individual. He
contends the body is just a piece of planet borrowed, and the boundaries of
sensation determine who someone is and is not. He says people should embrace
the separation of body and mind, and expand their boundaries of sensation to experience
everyone as himself or herself. Empathy is natural to humans, so by including
the experience of as many people as possible within our boundaries, we can
conquer every pressing problem on the planet.

I also loved his message that the
attitude of “I don’t know” is an engine for the acquisition of knowledge, such
that we always should be very hesitant to say that we know.

ALWAR BALASUBRAMANIAM –
ARTIST

The renowned sculptor and
painter, Alwar
Balasubramaniam, quite simply blew our minds, with his art, and with the
impulses behind it.One thing he
has been exploring is the relationship between meaning and context.In addition to showing slides of his
arresting works, he told a hilarious joke about how different people would
respond to the question of why a cow crosses the road, depending on their frame
of reference.Martin Luther King
would say that he has a dream – of a day when cows are given respect, and do
not have their motives questioned.Moses would say that God told the cow:“Thou shalt cross the road.”Freud would say that by asking the question, you reveal a
deep-seated insecurity about your sexuality, because you are not sure which
side of the road you should be on.The Buddha would say, and I would have to agree, that the very premise
of the question, coming from a non-cow, denies your essential cow nature.But here’s the official summary from
the TED Blog:

Alwar Balasubramaniam, a sculptor, painter and printmaker, is fascinated
by the transition from the present to the future, the traces that entities
leave behind as they pass through time. Through art that is part performance,
part sculpture, he explores the possibilities that emerge from these
transitions and self-discoveries. He uses plaster and other materials to
capture traces such as a fingerprint, the path of the sun through the sky,
flames ... and the human face. But how real are these traces? His work
highlights how subjective, context-driven all experience is. The mind creates
meaning; meaning isn't independent of it. He shows artwork that is designed to
decay over time -- a bust made of semi-solid material that melts, slowly losing
value as time goes on. A later sculpture captures the inverse -- attempting to
create "something from nothing" by growing more substance as time
passes. His later works explore perception, the substance of unseen things such
as electricity, magnetism, light.

The above is just a sampling of the many speakers and
performers that made TEDIndia an experience none of us will ever forget.If I had to sum up the conference in
one phrase, I could not do better than the TED slogan, “ideas worth spreading.”And again, those ideas were spread not
only by the speakers, but also by the attendees.In that spirit, I would like to conclude with my company’s
own idea that we hope is worth spreading, and which we spread at the
conference:

Imagine
a world where high-quality legal services are affordable! Imagine deals getting
done, because the attorneys don't kill them, with overlawyering and
overcharging. Contemplate court cases and other disputes being resolved on
their merits, rather than simply on the basis of whether one side cannot or
will not pay the absurdly high costs of litigation. Visualize how much further
the funds of social entrepreneurs and social investors could go, if exorbitant
legal fees did not stand in the way. Think about legal professionals located in
places that suit the interests of clients, rather than in the most expensive
parts of the most expensive cities in the world. Consider the resultant savings when legal bills are based on services, not real estate. Envision deals and cases staffed by the most talented and
enthusiastic lawyers available. Open your mind to the possibility that many of
those lawyers are in India! And
consider the fact that this kind of outsourcing actually creates more legal
jobs in the West, rather than cutting them.Every time a deal is done, or a litigation is waged, because
legal services are suddenly affordable, it means more work for the Western
lawyers involved in supervision, editing, and/or appearing in court.This is not only a dream. It is happening every day, thanks to
legal outsourcing in India.